San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Netflix film traces a life on whitewater
‘River Runner’ gives an intimate view of kayaker Scott Lindgren
Scott Lindgren woke up Wednesday morning feeling vulnerable, and understandably so: A documentary film about his life had just been released on Netflix.
The film, “The River Runner,” is an intimate look at Lindgren, a 49-year-old California athlete who is one of the world’s greatest whitewater kayakers. He has claimed first descents on burly waterways in North America, Africa and Asia but also struggled with substance abuse and a brain tumor that derailed his career for a time.
Lindgren, who lives outside Auburn, near the North Fork of the American River in Placer County, has graced magazine covers and been featured on morning talk shows for his exploits, but “The River Runner” turns the lens on parts of his life he’d kept private until now.
“It’s tricky putting yourself out there,” he said. “I’m super excited to share but definitely feeling a little bit vulnerable.”
The early concept for the film, directed by Rush Sturges, another pro kayaker and filmmaker, who grew up near the Salmon River in Siskiyou County, was to chronicle the sport’s history in California. The state’s epic mountain ranges — most notably the Sierra — are veined with smooth granite channels that steer and pump what is arguably the highest concentration of Earth’s best whitewater.
During the sport’s golden era in the 1990s, Lindgren was its pioneer and champion, fearlessly paddling rapids and waterfalls with his brother and friends while filming their expeditions and releasing short films on VHS. Sturges grew up watching them.
“He was like the Warren Miller of kayaking — that kind of influence,” said Sturges, 36, who lives in White
Salmon, Wash., referencing the famous skiing filmmaker.
The niche whitewater world doesn’t attract the volume of participants or sponsorship cash found in, say, skiing or surfing, and lacks adequate documentation, Sturges said. But the focus of the film shifted as Sturges came to understand Lindgren’s backstory and the two men bonded. The most compelling element became the kayaker’s personal journey.
“We both became pretty aware that’s what needed to happen, just realizing that this is a deeper story than Scott’s legacy within the sport,”
Sturges said.
The 2018 Oscar-winning climbing documentary “Free Solo,” which showcased Alex Honnold’s incredible ropeless ascent of Yosemite’s El Capitan, “taught us that general audiences do actually care about these niche sports; they just need to be invested in the characters and the story,” Sturges said. “That was definitely an inspiration to us.” “The River Runner” shows the scars of Lindgren’s rough childhood in a rundown corner of the San Bernardino Valley to help explain his compulsion to charge dangerous water later in life. After
his parents’ divorce, Lindgren said his father “just wasn’t in the picture” at a time when he and his brother were being relentlessly targeted by bullies and racking up school suspensions and arrests for misdemeanor crimes.
One day, walking home, Lindgren was stabbed in the arm by another young boy during a fistfight. He and his brother decided to hide the incident from their mother.
“It was like, let’s bury this thing; let’s never have another conversation about it,” Lindgren said. That coping mechanism would carry through into adulthood.
After the family moved north to the Sacramento Valley, a neighbor began taking the teenage Lindgren boys on river rafting trips. They soon became rafting guides.
“He really presented the idea that there was something more to life than partying, getting into fights and doing illegal shit,” Lindgren said. The river, he said, “enlightened my brother and I.”
From that point, Lindgren grew into a kayaking master, paddling 200-plus days per year and exploring un-run waterways around the world, including a quartet of beastly rivers flowing off of Mount Kailash in the Himalayas.
To offset the rush of charging whitewater, Lindgren fell into a pattern of substance abuse. Then in the early 2000s, after he struggled uncharacteristically down a river in Africa, doctors discovered a baseball-sized tumor wrapped around his carotid artery. They successfully removed it, but the fallout led Lindgren to an eight-year hiatus from the sport.
During that period, he sought therapy and meditation to help repair his life, which he said would have been unthinkable to his younger self, and built himself back into an elite expedition kayaker.
“In the last six years, I’ve gotten in shape and gotten back to my old ways” of paddling, Lindgren said.
Today, Lindgren runs an apparel company called Remote Threads with his brother and leads retreats at Cosumnes River Ranch in the Sierra foothills.
Sturges self-financed the documentary early on, but later raised money through a partnership with a Denver nonprofit that assists children with cancer called First Descents. About a quarter of the film’s profits will be funneled to the group.
“The River Runner” has been accepted into about a dozen film festivals around the country and won awards at a couple as well. Sturges and Lindgren hope it breaks through to mainstream audiences who wouldn’t otherwise seek out a movie about kayaking.
“If one person comes away semi-inspired, and they can relate and it helps with something they’re struggling through, I’d feel incredibly grateful for that,” Lindgren said.